Society and Economy in England, 1715–1763 - Lyceum Books

54 Part I The Age of the Landed Oligarchy
carefully drawn up and defended by the law, provided that each inheritor got the
land under severe restrictions: he must not alienate (sell) any of it; it was thus
entailed. By the principle of entailment, therefore, strict settlements turned the
owner of an estate into a sort of life tenant. A squire might settle his land on his
son, but on legal condition that the son in turn pass the estate to the grandson. And
the son, by powerful social custom, resettled the estate on his son by making the
same sort of will, and so on down the generations.
This desire to keep estates intact had heavy consequences for other sons in the
family and for all daughters. Because only the eldest son would inherit, different
means of support had to be found for all the other offspring. Here is where patronage,
“friendship,” and “interest” came into play. With proper connections, younger
sons could be sent into the professions—the clergy, army, navy, or medicine. Entry
into business was much less favored, since work of a self-interested sort was
thought to be tainted by “trade” and therefore to some degree was dishonorable and
thus ungentlemanly. But no landlord opposed money itself; hence the typical landlord
would be delighted if his sons married wealthy heiresses, regardless of the
source of their fortunes. Marriage to a rich banker’s or merchant’s daughter might
provide a financial base for a second or third son from which he might launch an
effort to buy an estate. In this way, there was an important flow of noninheriting
sons downward into the professions, which over time helped to elevate the professions
in status and which raised the status of mercantile daughters upward into
landed society. This upward and downward mobility helped bond landed and commercial
wealth together.
Daughters provided a major problem for landowning families, for they had to
be married off well, without loss of status; yet the daughters rarely brought an
estate with them. Women could own landed property, and a significant number
(mainly widows) did; but the custom in landed families generally was to keep the
estates in men’s hands. Thus to find and secure suitable marriages for their daughters
was a matter of ceaseless calculating and campaigning for the landowner and
his wife. To make his daughter attractive on the marriage market, a landowner customarily
bestowed a dowry on his daughter at the time of her marriage. These
dowries might amount to thousands of pounds, and everyone thought it perfectly
proper if the prospective groom (or rather his family) bargained to get the dowry
increased. Thus, having a bevy of daughters was a serious drain on a family’s
resources and was regarded by most landlords as at best a mixed blessing.
These circumstances made marriage arrangements within the landowning
orders a matter of delicate negotiations and bargaining between families, not
unlike diplomatic negotiations between countries. Family fortunes and the status
of the lineage were at stake, so parents played a major role in choosing partners for
their children. The precise weight assumed by parental opinion varied from family
to family, depending on the particular mix of personalities involved. Moreover, the
balance between parental choice and the young person’s preference was shifting
during the century, as individualism, reason, and eventually romantic sensibility
grew in cultural importance. As the decades passed, young people expected to play
a bigger role in their own matchmaking and the parents a lesser role. In the sev-